Caleb Cyr

Professor Emerson

ENG 110 H6

13 Oct. 2017

 

Nowadays, distractions are all around us. From actual physical distractions in the noisy world of today, to the ever distracting rabbit hole known as the internet, it seems that we just can’t escape them. You’re online reading an article, when you see another interesting header and you click it. Before you know it you’re multiple websites away from where you started, and what you’re looking at has nothing to do with the original page you were looking at. All the while, you’ve also been taking in the information from various advertisements on the side, as well as seeing headlines to links to other pages you may not even go to. While doing this you might even be watching TV, messaging your friends, listening to your favorite playlist, or even writing your paper for a class that’s due the next day. All of this sounds ideal, right? All of the information you could ever need at the tips of your fingers whenever you need it, whatever else you might be doing. However the reality is that these distractions and use of “multitasking” are not beneficial to people. Having constant distractions as many people have now are harming young minds, causing people to lack attention.

Although we are more connected and informed than ever, our brains are not used to it. Starting as early on as the invention of the telephone technology has made it so “each of us exists simultaneously in not just one here but in several,” as Richard Restak referred to it in his piece “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome Of Our Era” (Restak 380). We can be talking to our friend we’re hanging out with at the same instant we’re messaging our friend halfway across the country, or even across the world. During that moment we’re “here” with our friend, as well as being “here” with our friend many miles away. Before technology, we never had the chance to experience this. However, technology allows us to “reach from one end of the world to another and wipe out differences in time, space, and place” (Restak 381). While we may be able to switch back and forth between the two different states of being “here,” we are not entirely focused on either.

Even though many people claim to multitask all the time, multitasking is essentially a myth. When you are “multitasking” your brain is really just switching back and forth between the different tasks you’re attending to. While doing multiple different activities, your focus is not on one single activity but instead on both at the same time. The different activities distract you from the other ones you’re performing simultaneously. For example, in “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era”, Restak gives an example where a very stressed mother is getting her kids ready. The child that’s eating a grilled cheese starts complaining, and the mother just tells her to eat it since she doesn’t have time to make anything else or to argue with her daughter. However, the daughter replies with, “I can’t eat it, Mom. You left the plastic on the cheese” (Restak 383).

When trying to multitask, you complete the multiple activities with less efficiency than if you were to just do them seperate. In his article “In Defense of Distraction,” Sam Anderson writes an explanation for this saying that, “the brain processes different kinds of information on a variety of separate ‘channels’ – a language channel, a visual channel, an auditory channel, and so on – each of which can process only one stream of information at a time. If you overburden a channel, the brain becomes inefficient and mistake-prone” (Anderson 4). There can be exceptions to this, however.

If performing multiple tasks that use separate channels of the brain it can be helpful, as long as the smaller activities doesn’t interrupt the main activity. Restak talks about how listening to music can help people who work with their hands, specifically surgeons, perform their jobs more effectively. One surgeon he interviewed referred to the music as not a distraction, but “a way of blocking out all of the other distractions” (Restak 384). Since the two activities, performing surgery and listening to music, require different parts of the brain to activate, they can happen at the same time without much of a problem without having to “compete” for your attention. Similarly Restak points out how if a surgeon were to listen to an audiobook instead of music, there would probably be some issues. Sometimes, activities that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with each other can still be affected when performed at the same time.

Activities that seem like they’d have no connection, such as talking on the phone and driving, suffer when you do them together. Restak gives an example of this, talking about a scenario where someone on the talking to their friend on the phone is having trouble focusing on driving in deteriorating conditions as well. Although talking and listening to their friend are auditory tasks, “If the person on the other end of the phone is describing a visual scene … that conversation can actually occupy your visual channel enough to impair your ability to see what’s around you on the road” (Anderson 4). With that being said, it’s easy to see how being distracted by multitasking can be not so efficient.

Younger people who have grown up in this world of constant distractions have become more used to being distracted than older generations.  In her essay “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” Robin Marantz Henig points out, “Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into their 20s” (Henig 204). Since the brain takes into your 20s to develop, young people up until that age are still cognitively developing while living in today’s distracting world. Older generations didn’t have as much technology to distract them while they were still developing, so their brains could have a harder time getting used to this new abundance of information. This could explain why younger people tend to be more efficient when multitasking than their older counterparts.

In an experiment to see how talking on the phone while driving may affect the person’s abilities to drive, younger drivers as well as 55-65 year old drivers were asked to answer a call using the touchscreen built into the car’s dashboard. While doing this, they had to drive normally as well as come to a stop. “While the distracting ring had only a slight effect on the stopping distance of younger drivers (0.61 seconds rather than 0.5 seconds), it had a profound effect on the stopping distance of drivers between 55 and 65 years of age: 0.82 seconds rather than 0.61 seconds, according to researchers” (Restak 382). While younger people are better at multitasking than people who are older, it does come with it’s own price. Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have both become very common in today’s world, with characteristics of the two disorders now being considered ordinary behavior in society.

Is this constant demand for our attention to blame for the increase of ADD and ADHD? Although both disorders can be passed down genetically, it’s not always so. “Typically, the parents of a child diagnosed with the disorder will be found upon interview to exhibit many of the criteria for adult ADD/ADHD. But many cases of ADD/ADHD in both children and adults occur without any hereditary disposition, suggesting the probability of culturally induced ADD/ADHD” (Restak 376). The constant input of information from today’s world causes our brains to shift back and forth within a few tenths of a second. With many critics commenting on how our society is becoming a society with ADHD and ADD, it makes you wonder if the increase in demands on our attention are to blame.

Many people feel the need to add elements of these disorders to be successful at work. People need to constantly keep up with the bustle of the modern workplace, where distractions are constantly being thrown at them. This sensory overload causes our brains to keep up with the increase of information within shorter time spans. Many people turn to neuroenhancers to help them focus on the job, despite them being illegal. Neuroenhancers are drugs, such as Ritalin and Adderall for example, designed to treat mental disorders that cause users without these disorder to gain greater attention. Anderson gives an example about a guy named Joshua Foer, who after taking neuroenhancers “beat his unbeatable brother at Ping-Pong, solved anagrams, devoured dense books. ‘The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my in-box apparently shut down,’ he wrote” (Anderson 8).

“How are these neuroenhancers a bad thing?” you may be asking. Some people even push for legalization, saying that they’re just a tool to help people think. However Anderson gives a good point, saying that they are known to decrease the creativity of people. I remember once my friend told me that her boyfriend, who has pretty noticeable ADHD, told her chooses not to take his medication because it makes him feel like a zombie and not like himself.

The world around us is becoming evermore distracting, with technology allowing us to do and see things previously impossible. The constant input of information we need to be able to process is always expanding, which can only lead to greater sensory overload. Over time, this constant sensory overload is likely causing us to become a culture of ADD/ADHD. We currently embrace elements of these disorders as lifestyle choices because we have no other option besides falling behind in today’s fast paced world. How may we instead combat growing fog of distraction from continuing to creep in? Many people choose to just drug themselves into focus, but is that really productive? Or is it just covering their problem of being distracted by another problem? I really do not know how we may come to fix this, and with technology continuously developing, I feel like distraction can only become more of a problem

 

 

Works Cited

Anderson, Sam. “In Defense of Distraction.” New York, NYMag.com, 17 May 2009, nymag.com/news/features/56793/.

Henig, Robin Henig. “What Is It about 20-Somethings?” Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios. 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin, 2016, pp 198-213.

Restak, Richard. “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era.” Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios. 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin, 2016, pp 373-385.